Your life is yours. There are many sectors to it. So you decide what meaningful actually means and which sector it belongs to.
Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
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Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#2This one is really hard tbh. I don't think I could name one. There was a period where I worked in a warehouse and listened to audio books and college lectures and all those together allowed me to make connections I don't think I would have made otherwise.
A very meaningful book I read was "A Short History of Nearly Everything" just because it showed me how much to the world there was to discover. It made me very optimistic.
I haven't finished "The Brothers Karamazov" and I don't think I would call it a "meaningful contribution" to my life _but_ I do think so far it is one of the only books that has made me say "wow." Every sentence seems to be crafted to perfection and connect with you on a deeper level. I can't personally relate to it too well but I would say everyone should get to experience a bit of it.
Besides those, I read a few auto/biographies which where interesting, I could relate to and gave me motivation and discipline.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#3This is easy...Atlas Shrugged
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#4Life of Pi was very memorable in my childhood. The imagery in that book captured my young imagination. I thought about that book a lot. I feel like it contributed something meaningful, in that it’s ok to not take life too seriously.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#5The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, attributed to Aśvaghoṣa but probably composed much later in China.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#6The works of Alan Watts (starting with The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are) helped me see outside of Western religions and philosophies. It led me to explore many other perspectives on this amazing planet and its people, and to more completely trusting my intuitions.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#7[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#8Ralph Waldo Emerson's collection of essays:
"Self-Reliance and Nature The Complete First and Second Series of Emerson's Essays"
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#9This is easy...Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged had a profound influence on me, too.
It is a treatise on selfishness. A stench of arrogance leaks out from every paragraph. It showed me the worst of the worst. What not to be. I like to think reading it made me a more empathetic, social, caring person. It also awakened my antenna to the vileness in people that may lie just below the skin.
That is was excruciatingly badly written was a bonus. It showed me that dangerous ideologies are persistent enough to survive laughably poor communication.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#10Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker